If you’ve been following me on twitter @CaffeinatedFae you have probably seen the huge scandal about Cristiane Serruya who has plagiarized at least 95 books, 43 authors, 3 articles,3 websites, & 2 recipes. I’m creating this post so that everyone can support the real authors and buy the books that were so amazing #CopyPasteCris thought they needed to be stolen.

I want to give a HUGE shoutout to Claire Ryan (@aetherlev) for creating an amazing algorithm that has been finding more plagiarism in the #CopyPasteCris scandal! FYI she’s an author so check out her books here. Claire just posted a brand new blog post about #CopyPasteCris! It’s a really interesting perspective and you should all take a look at it!

Also, if you want to hear Claire and I talk about #CopyPasteCris with Sarah from Smart Bitches Trashy Books give this awesome podcast a listen!

Nora Roberts has officially filed papers to sue Cristiane Serruya! Read all about it here. First decisions in the lawsuit can be found here!

*I am going off trust of the Romancelandia twitter community with the reports of plagiarism which means that if there is a mistake please let me know. I do not have the ability to check every source so I am creating this list through tweets, screenshots, and the community of Twitter*

There were so many people on twitter yesterday trying to find passages that were plagiarized. Screenshots were shared & we compiled a list of everyone that has been affected. You can search #CopyPasteCris on twitter and see it all unfold.

Thank you for sharing. So how do we get the selfpub publishers start using ALL the available tools to check books, articles out for possible plagiarism? If universities check every paper and exam, why not Amazon, Kobo, Nook etc? Again thank you for keeping us all update.

I think what we’re going to need to do is demand that Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and all other book purchasing sites force an author to run their book through plagiarism software before it can be self-published. We need to realize that most books will have a certain amount of plagiarism in them simply due to common sentences and phrases but many of these reported are entire scenes and entire passages.

My “day job” is academic writing coaching at the grad school & doctoral level, and the academic world has done a great job of incubating and bringing to maturity several different plagiarism-detection tools that have become pretty sophisticated. TurnItIn.com is one of the most widely-used ones. There is absolutely no reason why traditional publishers and small presses could not add a quick plagiarism check to their manuscripts at any point during the process (the earlier the better, obviously). But if KDP, B&N, Kobo, and Smashwords all suddenly added “a quick plagiarism check” to the document review process, let’s all prepare for two things:
1. The first three months will be hell as TurnItIn.com et alia all scale up to handle the sudden surge in demand. That’s fine. Bring it on. Just brace yourself for it.
2. Prepare to defend your manuscript when it gets kicked back to you by overzealous algorithms that flagged it as “plagiarized.” Seriously, I’ve had some student papers register as much as 30% non-original when I know first-hand that the student wrote the entire thing themselves. Partly this is because academia has certain terms and phrases and even passages that are learned almost by rote and passed along the same way, so they look like they were “plagiarized” when they were either clumsily paraphrased or too-accurately regurgitated.
Genre fiction has its tropes too… and we’re going to discover way more of these than we suspected, in vivid detail, if TurnitIn.com is vetting all our manuscripts. We must expect that IT guys who have never worked in academia will be writing algorithms to reject our manuscripts in job lots in order to 100% guarantee zero plagiarism on their platform.

In my dream world, I would love to see books run through a plagiarism checker and if they’re over 20% plagiarized, they’re sent to an actual person to look through them. Common phrases are used so often that I wouldn’t be surprised if most books have a 5-10% rate directly from the use of common phrases & analogies. Granted, I do know that I’m in a dream world and that most likely it will be implemented poorly and authors will suffer. I can only hope that that isn’t the case.

Victoria – How did you find out? Was it reported by a reader? Or did you have a way of checking? I’m just curious. I’m 100% certain no one would bother plagiarizing my one and only historical romance, but I’m curious how it works!

Also, there was a box set for The Brothers Sinister series by Courtney Milan, which contains The Duchess War, on Amazon. For those like me who’ve never read any of her stuff and want to support the original authors.

Thanks for letting us all know! Right now, the only confirmed Nora Roberts we have are The Liar, Private Scandals, and Whiskey Beach. The 4th and 5th have yet to be uncovered. My guess is that her team is working on finding everything they can & will announce them at a later time. I will correct my blog to show this.

So far the only author I read is NR the others I’ve never read. I no longer read Ms Daily. Nora and the authors I do read work too hard to have work stolen from their heart and souls. Keep up the good work Nora.

It really is a shame that this happened. I truly hope that with the involvement of Nora Roberts & Courtney Milan etc. something truly changes when it comes to Kindle Unlimited & other ebook distributors.

Thanks for tackling this. With the scope of plagiarism revealed, it’s hard to believe that “Cris” is not a large-scale scam for profit. Is it an accident that the “author” lives in a country where it’s hard for Americans to pursue legal remedies?

Those are all very good points. My guess is that she is going to be back with a new pen name. That is why most if not all authors are demanding that Amazon and other ebook distributors add a plagiarism checker when you upload a book.

I had never heard of her before these plagiarism allocations went public. Aren’t you afraid of giving her unearned publicity with this? She’s liable to sell more books to people who are just dying to find the copied passages in her books. I hate this type of lazy thief myself, but there are always what you’d call looky loos, ya know? I just hope she doesn’t end up with more sales because if this.

I do not feel that I am giving her any publicity either. I have her name once in the blog post saying that she plagiarized works. I have no links to her books, nor am I encouraging anyone to buy her books. That is actually one of the reasons I do not have where the books were copied. If someone wants to see that, they can search #CopyPasteCris and see the passages along with screenshots & side by side comparisons. I have linked to all of the books that she plagiarized with the hope that they will support the true authors and not the woman who plagiarized some of the most famous romance authors. But, I do see your point as well. I just hope that if someone does have a copy of her book somewhere, they will help find more of the books that she plagiarized.

I am amazed by how many big names I recognize! You would think, if someone thought they were going to get away with plagiarism, they wouldn’t steal from bigger authors. Thanks for putting this amazing list together and not letting this fade into the background 🙂